The world gets the geofencing bug: Life360’s family locator app explodes overseas

In January, Chris Hulls, CEO and co-founder of Life360, noticed an odd thing had started to happen. Even though Life360’s family-focused location app was designed for use in the U.S., it was suddenly being downloaded in huge volumes in Asia. That trend quickly spread to several countries in Europe and even South America. Six months later, more than half of Life360’s user base is now overseas.

Life360 not only didn’t spend a dime on marketing overseas, many of its app’s core features don’t even work outside U.S. borders. Life360 offers a location service, which allows families to keep tabs on their members’ locations through geofencing technology. For instance, when junior arrives home from school, mom and dad get a text message notification he’s arrived.

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Life 360 supports international maps, and the app is available for download in the Google Play store, iTunes App Store and other app markets internationally. But it doesn’t register phone numbers outside of the U.S., and everything in the app is written in English. That means some 15 million customers are using only a bare-bones version of its service, getting their location alerts through email instead of SMS, while many of them are deciphering a foreign language to use its core functions.

A heat map showing Life360 global check-ins

Why? Hulls said he’s noticed that carriers all over the world have started launching and marketing their own family locator apps, but as with many carrier services, those apps come with hefty monthly subscription fees and lack the features of independently developed equivalents. Hulls thinks Life360 basically rode the operators’ marketing wave. Consumers were disappointed in what their carriers offered, so they searched the app stores and came across Life360, Hulls said.

“A good example is the carrier’s navigation apps,” Hulls said. “They were cash cows for awhile, but consumers turned to free apps like Waze, not only because they were free, but because they were so much better at what they were intended to do than what the carriers were offering.”

You can imagine what’s happening next. Life360 is adding global support for its app. It’s starting with international SMS and foreign language support in several Asian countries this fall, and then move to Europe and other regions of the world later this year and next.

The family-focused anti-social network

One of the main reasons Life360 needs to get fully localized in other countries is because it wants to get paid. All of those millions of families are using its free service, which lets them track their members locations gratis but only allows them to set two geofences (usually home and work).

Life360’s business model is built on converting those free users into monthly subscribers that pay $5 per month per family. That premium service allows them to set up geofences around 25 locations and get access to a live advisor that helps with minor emergencies, such as arranging a tow truck or contacting a locksmith.

Though only a small portion of its customers have signed up for the premium plan so far (Hulls wouldn’t reveal how many), Life360 has a big base to work from. The Fontinalis-and Bessemer-backed startup has already signed up 30 million free users, each forming part of one of its 17 million individual family networks. I say networks, because Hulls doesn’t view Life360 as merely a tracking app.

“We’re trying to shake this notion that we’re only a tool for over-protective parents or suspicious spouses,” Hulls said.

Instead, Life360 wants to use location as the foundation for a family-oriented and private social network – think an even more restrictive Path built around GPS. The idea is to create a social nucleus where members can communicate using location as the primary reference. If dad is halfway home, mom can ping him in-app to remind him to stop by the grocery store. When your daughter’s flight gets in early, the entire family is notified simultaneously, allowing them to coordinate who will pick her up.

You can actually think of Life360 as one of the new breed of anti-social networks that take advantage of social media’s new tools while actually limiting their social scope. Hulls said that when you’re dealing in real-time location, privacy becomes of the utmost importance. By limiting the social network to a family, Life360 can take full advantage of location services without imposing complicated in-network safeguards to protect privacy.